Career Reflection - 2023

I wrote a much more detailed career reflection in a Google Doc.

Self-Portrait

In terms of personality and interests, I lean toward being a generalist. At the same time, I want to become a T-shaped or Pi-shaped person: broad in knowledge, but with one or two areas of real depth, and eventually become an expert in those areas. Naturally, that question of what to go deep on is also what I spend the most time thinking about now.

I have sustained and broad curiosity. I like learning about new things, expanding my existing knowledge base, and deliberately avoiding being constrained by an existing path.
I am ambitious, unwilling to settle, and I keep an upward drive. I do not give up easily, and I trust my ability to learn. If others can do something, I believe I should be able to do it well too.
I actively create challenges for myself, both at work and in life, by putting myself in uncomfortable zones so that I do not fall into the status quo. Sometimes I like trying risky things such as skydiving or snowboarding. I find it exciting when risk tolerance and control can be improved through training, especially when practice lets me take on more complex situations. That feels genuinely rewarding. I am also willing to accept challenges from the outside. I am comfortable stepping into uncomfortable zones: when I can analyze the growth opportunity clearly, I try to find ways to handle the situation; when I cannot analyze the situation or opportunity clearly, I am willing to ask others for advice and help.
I enjoy meeting people and working with others. Compared with a single-alpha-person setting, I prefer a small elite cohort, where each person has distinct strengths and the group pushes itself fully toward a shared goal.
I like sharing what I know with others. At work, I organize knowledge-sharing activities to help spread knowledge and reduce siloed knowledge.
I actively look for holistic solutions. I want to understand the bigger picture behind an immediate problem and connect the dots, so that the solution is not only for the current issue but is also better prepared for future ones.
I am not content to simply follow existing rules. Before accepting them, I want to understand whether they are reasonable and what context produced them. If they are not reasonable, I look for ways to challenge them. If the environment and culture support it, for example through bottom-up decision-making, I will try to propose changes, such as re-standardizing a team's release process and release communication, promoting better testing culture and habits, or shifting tech project planning from reactive to proactive through direct coordination with operations.
I handle pressure fairly well. That comes from competitive programming in middle and high school, research during my PhD, and my experience at Citadel.
I strongly prefer deep and sometimes even distinctive understanding. A shallow understanding of things usually leaves me unsatisfied. That was also one of the reasons I completed a PhD. It also gave me the chance to see the best people in the field, which was deeply motivating and made me want the chance to compete on the same stage.
My experience at Google gave me a solid software engineering foundation, and my experience at Citadel trained my commercial mindset very well. The former is an advantage I have over developers who grew up only in fintech or banking; the latter is an advantage I have over developers who grew up only in tech, especially big tech.

Team and Peers

The best environment for a person is to be surrounded by outstanding people, because learning from the people around you is faster, more effective, and more enjoyable. In my view, environment not only shifts the probability distribution of a person's performance, but also affects the upper bound of what that person can reach. For example, exceptional students can of course emerge from remote areas through talent and effort, but that is much rarer and harder than succeeding in places with strong student cohorts and teaching resources. And someone who becomes an IOI gold medalist entirely through self-study is essentially unheard of. The same logic applies in both industry and academia. That is why finding an excellent team and staying around highly capable people is such an important force multiplier for personal growth.

Peers I enjoy working with:

Have independent thinking, but are also willing to exchange different ideas and seek common ground while preserving differences.
Have ambition, pursue their own goals, and strive for excellence.
Are amicable as people and professional in how they work; they focus on the matter rather than the person, are not overly judgmental, and understand that people come from different backgrounds.
Respect other people and stay open to new things, new ideas, and new concepts. Even if they cannot personally accept or agree with something, they still remain respectful to others.
Value collaboration and recognize that good collaboration can make 1 + 1 > 2. They avoid unnecessary internal competition and internal friction. Strongly self-driven people will naturally have some competitive instinct, which is common and can even be beneficial. But when people fail to distinguish between external and internal competition and focus too much on competing internally, collaboration becomes frustrating.

Sometimes very capable people also come with certain personality traits, or weaknesses: extremely confident and resilient, but stubborn; hardworking and highly independent, but poor at collaboration; pursuing excellence, but arrogant. Some of these traits contribute to their success, but that does not mean I can necessarily work well with them and create a win-win outcome. That is why team culture matters.

A strong team culture can coordinate different personalities and let the team's talent perform at its best. In my view, the most important foundation of a good team is psychological safety, which is also what Google's research over the past decade found. In addition, internal collaboration, shared values, a common goal, and a democratic atmosphere all matter. One example I strongly dislike is a lab where the principal investigator alone decides the research direction, and then assigns the same topic to two or three PhD students or postdocs at the same time and lets them compete. Whoever finishes first gets authorship and publication, while the rest become expendable labor and the PI captures the research output. That kind of top-down atmosphere, where the team leader promotes internal competition over collaboration and rules by fiat, is exactly what I want to avoid.

"
I don’t want to work for other people, I want to work with other people.

Startup Teams

What matters most to me about a startup team:

Whether the founder(s) and the team are strong, whether we can collaborate well, and whether the startup has real conviction in what it is building.
Whether the work itself is interesting, and whether I can learn new things from it.
Whether doing this work with this group of people makes me feel excited.

Why I consider startup teams:

To truly understand a field deeply, you often need to go through a build-from-zero process.
A startup is more likely to become a cause of my own, rather than just a job where I work for someone else.
The future upside of a startup is higher than that of an established company, though of course the risk is higher too.
If led well, a startup team can have stronger cohesion and can more easily avoid the diffusion of responsibility that often appears in large companies.

My concerns about small startup teams:

The team culture may be poor, and there may be no force within the team capable of balancing the founder. For example, an authoritarian leadership style may cause everyone else to simply obey; or a founder may be kind personally, but lead a team that is completely fragmented, with everyone doing their own thing. I have seen both in academia and in industry. The leader's personality, ability, and organizational skill are extremely important factors, especially on a small team.
Whether I fit the team. Some teams may be good in themselves, but for various reasons I may not fit them well or be able to integrate into them smoothly. This really depends on mutual interviewing and candid discussion. It helps a lot when a team makes its norms, expectations, and culture transparent. But I have found that some teams, including their leaders, are not actually clear on what kind of team they want to build or what kind of team culture they want.
Whether the startup can survive is also a concern that should not be ignored.

Ranking The Factors I Consider In A Job

1. Excellent Team

The more excellent people, the better. The stronger the team, the better. But the atmosphere must be good, everyone must be able to perform at their best, and team members should enjoy the experience of working together. If the day-to-day environment feels uncomfortable and the people I work with are not energizing, I will want to leave quickly. As for recognition and proper credit attribution, I think a genuinely good team will naturally do that well. If you have to play games in order to be recognized, then that is already a different game.

2. Interesting / Important Problems

There are two kinds of problems worth solving. One is interesting problems, where solving them demonstrates intelligence. The other is important problems, where solving them addresses something others cannot do. The rest may simply be work that needs to get done, and sometimes that kind of work is unavoidable. But if daily work consists only of "work that needs to get done" rather than one of the first two categories, then it becomes uninteresting.

3. Opportunities For Continuous Learning

Ideally, the problems at work should keep renewing themselves. When I return to them later, I should have learned something new and still find new things to explore. If the work is just repeated skilled labor, it quickly becomes dull. These continuing learning opportunities should ideally lead to deep knowledge, rather than just learning a little bit here and a little bit there, only to be forced onto the next topic before going deep.

4. Compensation

Compensation is not the main factor in my next job search, but it is still a factor for evaluating and comparing opportunities.

5. Work-Life Balance

I am someone who will proactively increase my own time commitment and pressure depending on what I am learning or working on. What I dislike is being forced into prolonged external pressure that I do not control, where I am effectively being led around by the nose. That is also why I am not interested in work that is purely in a service-provider role.

WLB should be divided into two cases:

If it is a mission or career that I genuinely believe in and love, then working time will naturally increase because of that passion.
If it is just a job, a job working for someone else, then WLB matters a great deal.

Notes On Past Work Experiences

Academia

Overall, I liked the research problems, but I did not like the academic career path, nor the academic lifestyle. To be fair, a large part of my dislike of academia comes from the very poor experience I had with my PhD advisor.

I was genuinely interested in the research topics. They were highly open-ended and came with a great deal of freedom.

There was near-total autonomy over research direction and work time. The flexibility was high.

(That much freedom is not entirely a good thing, especially for someone with my personality.)

University environments bring you into contact with many energetic young people, which makes intellectual collision easier and creates vitality.

For the individual, it is a comprehensive challenge. In essence, it is like building a startup yourself.

Google

Overall, Google has become like other large companies: career development depends first on tenure, second on finding new internal opportunities, such as Google Cloud in recent years, and third on navigating the company's organizational structure.

It is still one of the strongest big tech companies in the world. Many of its internal technologies are still at least three to five years ahead of other companies.

In some larger organizations, such as Search, Google's earlier culture is still relatively well preserved: respect for employees, support for innovation, and enough freedom to stimulate creativity. It is still possible for a 20% project to grow into an impactful new product.

It has good processes for helping new employees grow and for maintaining software engineering quality.

There are many outstanding software engineers. You can learn an enormous amount from colleagues, and in almost every subfield of computer science, you can find coworkers operating at the industry's frontier.

Citadel Commodity

It is currently the most successful commodity trading team. You can genuinely get exposure to many problems related to commodity trading.

Among Citadel's front-office organizations, it has the most open and collaboration-oriented culture: code is fully open internally, and technical and trading collaboration across groups is frequent.

There are many internal rotation opportunities, and people in tech have chances to move toward trading.

In recent years, many people from GS, MS, and JPMC have joined and tried to introduce more advanced fintech infrastructure, so there are many opportunities to rewrite legacy systems or build new ones.

Life Outlook

What I Currently Think Good Career Development Looks Like

Good career development should eventually transcend the specific organization one happens to be in and influence an entire field. It should gradually broaden my perspective as I grow: from problems within a team, to organizational problems, to company-level problems, to problems across a whole field. At the same time, it should give me chances to lead more and more people in solving bigger and bigger problems, and eventually to help the organization I am part of create greater influence or greater success in a field.
Different stages on that path require different skills. So a good career path should provide strong mentorship at each stage to help me move toward the next one and see the road upward more clearly.

Five-Year Expectation

In the next five years, I need to determine my main area of depth. The broad exploration of my early career needs to be consolidated during this period. Based on what I want from career development, I need to identify my main area of focus within five years and make tradeoffs by giving up some other possible directions. Once the area is chosen, I should also build some meaningful accomplishments and personal brand within five years.

Ten-Year Expectation

I want to be able to influence and guide the direction of the field I choose to go deep in during the previous five years.

Appendix

The appendix is my comparison of different internal career opportunities and paths within Citadel.